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3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Really helped me lean into my agnosticism and crystallized why I find atheists’ conviction so…religious. Also liked how she wove connections between historical figures, fiction, and modern religion. Good read!
“Where belief tries to expel doubt, faith walks with it, offering no easy answers. Belief insists, while faith hopes and trusts. The one is demanded, the other freely given, and this freedom means that real faith is both difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand-in-hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it. And sometimes even in conscious defiance of it.”
A spirited manifesto for open-ended questioning, boundless curiosity and free-playing creativiy; for engendering more questions as opposed to answering them and for the need for existential mystery and the incessant quest to solve the human puzzle.
Really interesting food for thought. It took me a very long time to read but that’s really because I often had to stop and argue with the author’s points. So it was definitely engaging and it lives up to the title.
Agonistic: A Spirited Manifesto is a beautifully written book. Hazelton brings up many fascinating and compelling arguments for accepting the unknown and embracing agnosticism as a "ism" in its own right. However, I struggled a bit with the organization of the book. There are a few sections that get a bit tangential. This parts are interesting (like the mathematic understanding of infinity and the universe) but seem to stray from her main points.
It's hard being an agnostic, harder in ways that most people don't recognize or even try and understand. Theists walk around with the security of their convictions and centuries of ritual and cultural experience to rely on. Atheists wield equal certainty, and add a special flavor of condescension for the self-identified agnostic — casting the lot of us as fence-sitters, sentimentalists, or merely too stupid to grasp their ontological arguments.
But as Hazleton lays out in this "spirited manifesto," that's just the beginning of the struggles of the agnostic. Because living with certainty is relatively easy. You know — or believe you know — the boundaries of your universe and your place in it. Once gained, certainty really isn't a whole lot of work, outside of occasionally sparring with people that disagree with you.
To be agnostic, by contrast, is to do the hard work of dwelling in uncertainty and really inhabiting it. You have to eschew easy answers. You have to take in new ideas and new data and new experiences and integrate them into your worldview in real time, all the time, without a guide or road map. And most importantly, you do this in full knowledge of the imperfection of your own perceptions and the limits of human cognition.
These are all things that I understand from my own stubborn refusal to play along with the binary choices of believers, but it's uncommon enough to meet a fellow avowed agnostic that Hazleton's book felt like a welcome message from a friend.
Drawing from her own experiences as a writer about religion, she explores most of the top-line points about being an agnostic — a discomfort with the finitude of "God," the role of mystery, a sort of humanist understanding of the importance of meaning, the divine nature of a materialist and unknowable universe and an exploration of the notion of the soul.
Hers is a light touch — while she references everybody from Spinoza to Einstein to David Foster Wallace, this is not the kind of book that lives and dies on citations. Instead it's just one person's perspective, sans-preaching, and a welcome bit of experience to chew on. I'd recommend it to anyone who similarly feels brow-beaten by others seeking to impose their labels.
But as Hazleton lays out in this "spirited manifesto," that's just the beginning of the struggles of the agnostic. Because living with certainty is relatively easy. You know — or believe you know — the boundaries of your universe and your place in it. Once gained, certainty really isn't a whole lot of work, outside of occasionally sparring with people that disagree with you.
To be agnostic, by contrast, is to do the hard work of dwelling in uncertainty and really inhabiting it. You have to eschew easy answers. You have to take in new ideas and new data and new experiences and integrate them into your worldview in real time, all the time, without a guide or road map. And most importantly, you do this in full knowledge of the imperfection of your own perceptions and the limits of human cognition.
These are all things that I understand from my own stubborn refusal to play along with the binary choices of believers, but it's uncommon enough to meet a fellow avowed agnostic that Hazleton's book felt like a welcome message from a friend.
Drawing from her own experiences as a writer about religion, she explores most of the top-line points about being an agnostic — a discomfort with the finitude of "God," the role of mystery, a sort of humanist understanding of the importance of meaning, the divine nature of a materialist and unknowable universe and an exploration of the notion of the soul.
Hers is a light touch — while she references everybody from Spinoza to Einstein to David Foster Wallace, this is not the kind of book that lives and dies on citations. Instead it's just one person's perspective, sans-preaching, and a welcome bit of experience to chew on. I'd recommend it to anyone who similarly feels brow-beaten by others seeking to impose their labels.
This is now one of my favourite books. There is such a sense of wonder and humour in it that made me feel very much at home. I honestly highlighted something on every page.
I loved the instances where she would take a word we use daily and break it down to its origins to show the true essence that is widely ignored or unknown. I loved that because it reminds me of my own study of the bible - looking at the meaning of ancient Greek and Hebrew words to get a sense of meaning. Yet funny how I was only coached to look up *certain* words, not all of them.
Anyway, this is something I will definitely read again.
I loved every minute I spent reading it.
"It takes a spirited delight in not knowing."
I loved the instances where she would take a word we use daily and break it down to its origins to show the true essence that is widely ignored or unknown. I loved that because it reminds me of my own study of the bible - looking at the meaning of ancient Greek and Hebrew words to get a sense of meaning. Yet funny how I was only coached to look up *certain* words, not all of them.
Anyway, this is something I will definitely read again.
I loved every minute I spent reading it.
"It takes a spirited delight in not knowing."
Nothing revelatory for me really. Although I enjoyed finding out some new facts and gained a couple of new perspectives:
-"Trying to make the unknowable knowable, we reduce it to what we know best. We make God human." In anthropomorphizing the objects and animals around us do we fail to see them for who they really are? And is that in a way what we've done to the idea of god? "What resulted was an extraordinarily petty, misogynistic idea of the divine- were triangles to invent a god, they would give him three sides." (I did chuckle at that). I'm starting to see more examples of the ways in which god has been created to have human features and it narrows the awe we can have for the things we cannot nor will ever understand. However, I have a soft spot for hearing about how some people in my life take great comfort and joy in the anthropomorphized descriptions of what god is to them "a loving heavenly father, creator of heaven and earth" for example.
-"poetic faith is the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment." She talks about how when we read books, we allow ourselves to accept fiction as reality and it gives us an expanded sense of our existence. It is part of an ongoing conversation of what it means to be human. That can also be applied to religious faith, and how it is a risk and a trust. "What faith actually requires is not belief, but the ability to suspend disbelief." I like how she discusses how religious fanatics actually are doing the opposite of believing, because there is no wrestling or doubting, a crucial aspect of faith. It brings me to try and figure out for myself, what do I want to believe in?
-"We don't even know for sure that our universe really had a beginning at all, as opposed to spending eternity doing something we don't understand prior to the big bang nucleosynthesis" I love hearing about how we're always one scientific discovery away from realizing everything we believe to be true is wrong
-Awe is not just a feeling for religious folks who attribute astounding things to be created by a god. It can be felt for the mysteries that surround us and in recognition that there is so much beauty here to be savored. "God is being itself, not *a* being"
-The author is not out here to say something special or new, just express what feels right to her "I have no conclusion here, (how could I, when the subject is infinity?), except to say that to my agnostic eye, that mountaintop sense of being at home in the universe-that ephemeral yet deep sense of connection-may be the essence of real religious feeling... Something modest and I hope more familiar: a simple gratefulness at being able to be fully conscious of the plain yet infinitely complex fact of my own stubborn, undeniable, improbable vitality"
-why try for perfection when "to err is to be human"? I would much rather see a painting filled with different assortments of circles, some wonky, some different sizes, some unfinished, than perfect computer made ones
-"Trying to make the unknowable knowable, we reduce it to what we know best. We make God human." In anthropomorphizing the objects and animals around us do we fail to see them for who they really are? And is that in a way what we've done to the idea of god? "What resulted was an extraordinarily petty, misogynistic idea of the divine- were triangles to invent a god, they would give him three sides." (I did chuckle at that). I'm starting to see more examples of the ways in which god has been created to have human features and it narrows the awe we can have for the things we cannot nor will ever understand. However, I have a soft spot for hearing about how some people in my life take great comfort and joy in the anthropomorphized descriptions of what god is to them "a loving heavenly father, creator of heaven and earth" for example.
-"poetic faith is the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment." She talks about how when we read books, we allow ourselves to accept fiction as reality and it gives us an expanded sense of our existence. It is part of an ongoing conversation of what it means to be human. That can also be applied to religious faith, and how it is a risk and a trust. "What faith actually requires is not belief, but the ability to suspend disbelief." I like how she discusses how religious fanatics actually are doing the opposite of believing, because there is no wrestling or doubting, a crucial aspect of faith. It brings me to try and figure out for myself, what do I want to believe in?
-"We don't even know for sure that our universe really had a beginning at all, as opposed to spending eternity doing something we don't understand prior to the big bang nucleosynthesis" I love hearing about how we're always one scientific discovery away from realizing everything we believe to be true is wrong
-Awe is not just a feeling for religious folks who attribute astounding things to be created by a god. It can be felt for the mysteries that surround us and in recognition that there is so much beauty here to be savored. "God is being itself, not *a* being"
-The author is not out here to say something special or new, just express what feels right to her "I have no conclusion here, (how could I, when the subject is infinity?), except to say that to my agnostic eye, that mountaintop sense of being at home in the universe-that ephemeral yet deep sense of connection-may be the essence of real religious feeling... Something modest and I hope more familiar: a simple gratefulness at being able to be fully conscious of the plain yet infinitely complex fact of my own stubborn, undeniable, improbable vitality"
-why try for perfection when "to err is to be human"? I would much rather see a painting filled with different assortments of circles, some wonky, some different sizes, some unfinished, than perfect computer made ones
I have intended to read this for months. Happy to make it my 150th, goal-making book of the year. It was shorter than it looked because of wide margins and line spacing. Pretty easy to read. She embraces the idea of uncertainty, doubt, and not knowing, as well as the inevitability of death. In many ways this was a refreshing perspective. I too have been frustrated with stringent dichotomies, especially in the realm of religion and belief. There were a lot of interesting quotes sprinkled throughout, borrowed a lot from philosophy. But there were also a couple issues with reasoning that bothered me. Like reducing any set of high/low pairs to heaven/hell. Like high & low IQ and high road vs. low road, looking up to or down on people...ridiculous. Utterly absurd.
No strong feelings either way. Strangely enough, a little too preachy.